Dreamgirls.

"Dreamgirls is a souped-up, collectors'-edition replica of a model that Detroit - I mean Hollywood - used to turn out with ease and regularity," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "But the problem with Dreamgirls - and it is not a small one - lies in those songs, which are not just musically and lyrically pedestrian, but historically and idiomatically disastrous."

Dave Kehr: "Bill Condon's film of the pseudo-Motown musical of the 1980s seems shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by the musical format best known to Americans in 2006: the competitive spectacle of American Idol, in which talent becomes a kind of weapon with which to bludgeon your way to the top."

"Dreamgirls sounds toe-tappingly fresh on paper, and yet I was so bored and unaffected that I barely remember watching it," sighs Aaron Hillis at the Reeler.

Updated through 12/22.

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "This is a puny, pinched vision of R&B history and of R&B itself, a sanitized, show-tunized reading of some of the greatest pop music to come out of the 1960s."

It really is all about Jennifer Hudson, of course, notes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle.

And she's reacted to her Golden Globe nomination... David Carr has an entertainingly hard time keeping a straight face.

Since "Dreamgirls catches fire only once," Alison Willmore offers a list of alternatives, "some films that juxtapose harsh realities with glorious escapist song-and-dance sequences."

Updates, 12/19: David Denby in the New Yorker: "Dreamgirls fulfills the ecstatic promise inherent in all musicals - that life can be dissolved into song and dance - but it does so without relinquishing the toughest estimate of how money and power work in the real world that song and dance leave behind."

For Salon, David Marchese recounts the history of that song.

The Voice's Michael Musto confirms rumors that Jennifer Hudson is a-okay.

Updates, 12/21: "[T]the hype surrounding the gaudy movie version of Dreamgirls is unacceptable," insists Armond White in the New York Press. "[T]his 'fun' is dubious, typecasting black American behavior and culture into shrillness and frivolity. The essential silliness of Dreamgirls was brilliantly captured in the little-seen indie Camp when a white teenage girl sang the showstopper to a pipsqueak black boy. It flipped the show's own stereotypes and exposed the song's inane sentimentality while demonstrating that it only functions as a theatrical device: Aunt Jemima Ex Machina."

Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper: "The fact that Dreamgirls isn't a particularly good movie seems mainly to stem from the fact that it isn't a particularly good show, but a good share of the blame has to fall on director Bill Condon."

Update, 12/22: Slate's Dana Stevens: "For all its flaws, Dreamgirls is what this holiday season needs. It's a big, fat, luscious movie in which no one is tortured, murdered, or mutilated (honestly, how many recent films can you say that about?), as well as a heartfelt paean to the transformative power of singing (even if the songs themselves are kind of meh)."

Posted by dwhudson at December 16, 2006 3:35 PM